A decades-old psychiatric study is influencing current debates over transgender youth health care. But a new analysis led by a survivor says the findings were deeply harmful and dangerously misleading.
“If I had to go to the toilet … I’d have the door open so they could check that I wasn’t just sitting down to pee. That I actually stood like a boy and urinated,” Jayne said.
“If I was playing solely with a group of girls, they’d make me then go and play with the boys.”
I don’t think most people realize how traumatizing experiences like this can be, to be institutionalized so you can be surveilled and regulated in how you pee, how you socialize, etc. - and as a child.
And the US supreme court is about to start hearing some cases that will allow them to declare state laws banning conversion therapy to be unconstitutional. It’s really sad that conservatives will torture and murder children to create an enemy for fascism to bring people together against whether its LGBTQ+ children or immigrant children.
what is bizarre is how little people actually seem to care about trans people specifically as a group - while they make a great scapegoat in terms of being a disempowered minority, they don’t whip up much political fervor or motivate action compared to, for example, immigrants (who are blamed for stealing jobs and economic prosperity).
In some ways it feels like trans folks are just an acceptable alternative target for people who really wish to air their grievances about gay folks more broadly, where the frustrations are with gay marriage being passed and the increased visibility and acceptance of gay people.
It’s an ideological issue. Some people need someone they feel superior to to distract them from how the people who consider themselves to be better than them are abusing them, by saying that some other group is actually responsible for the problems they are actually causing.
Thus the rich, conservatives in charge who are cutting jobs and creating immense inflation by allowing anticompetitive behavior by large corporations they make money from, blame the losses on immigrants. And immigrants have no way to fight back as they have no rights.
Ideological issues are more difficult to use as a distraction these days. It’s just harder to convince people that their inaction in failing to repress or murder people who are just trying to live their life will cause their deity or whatever to be disappointed or disown them and keep them out of paradise or whatever they believe. So, it’s not as effective to just say they’re evil, anymore, they need to invent things those people are doing to them even if they aren’t doing anything in reality. Problem is it’s becoming more and more apparent that trans people aren’t actually a threat, so they need to invent things like statistics saying that 50% of major mass shootings are done by trans people by inventing criteria to make only 8 or 9 of the thousands of mass shootings to be considered “major”, and thus the 4 mass shootings they found that were by trans people become 50%. As long as they keep repeating those numbers and isolating their audience from real statistics, it’s easy to maintain control that way. But the internet makes that difficult these days. Plus the economic issues are much more common among conservatives than having trans children. And trans people aren’t quite as historically repressed as POC who were slaves or immigrants who were running from horrible conditions, so its more difficult to keep them repressed. Same was true of gay, lesbian, and bi people a couple of decades ago. They were repressed, but not as economically repressed as POC and immigrants making them more likely to fight back and easier for conservatives to identify with.
I don’t think most people realize how traumatizing experiences like this can be, to be institutionalized so you can be surveilled and regulated in how you pee, how you socialize, etc. - and as a child.
And the US supreme court is about to start hearing some cases that will allow them to declare state laws banning conversion therapy to be unconstitutional. It’s really sad that conservatives will torture and murder children to create an enemy for fascism to bring people together against whether its LGBTQ+ children or immigrant children.
what is bizarre is how little people actually seem to care about trans people specifically as a group - while they make a great scapegoat in terms of being a disempowered minority, they don’t whip up much political fervor or motivate action compared to, for example, immigrants (who are blamed for stealing jobs and economic prosperity).
In some ways it feels like trans folks are just an acceptable alternative target for people who really wish to air their grievances about gay folks more broadly, where the frustrations are with gay marriage being passed and the increased visibility and acceptance of gay people.
It’s an ideological issue. Some people need someone they feel superior to to distract them from how the people who consider themselves to be better than them are abusing them, by saying that some other group is actually responsible for the problems they are actually causing.
Thus the rich, conservatives in charge who are cutting jobs and creating immense inflation by allowing anticompetitive behavior by large corporations they make money from, blame the losses on immigrants. And immigrants have no way to fight back as they have no rights.
Ideological issues are more difficult to use as a distraction these days. It’s just harder to convince people that their inaction in failing to repress or murder people who are just trying to live their life will cause their deity or whatever to be disappointed or disown them and keep them out of paradise or whatever they believe. So, it’s not as effective to just say they’re evil, anymore, they need to invent things those people are doing to them even if they aren’t doing anything in reality. Problem is it’s becoming more and more apparent that trans people aren’t actually a threat, so they need to invent things like statistics saying that 50% of major mass shootings are done by trans people by inventing criteria to make only 8 or 9 of the thousands of mass shootings to be considered “major”, and thus the 4 mass shootings they found that were by trans people become 50%. As long as they keep repeating those numbers and isolating their audience from real statistics, it’s easy to maintain control that way. But the internet makes that difficult these days. Plus the economic issues are much more common among conservatives than having trans children. And trans people aren’t quite as historically repressed as POC who were slaves or immigrants who were running from horrible conditions, so its more difficult to keep them repressed. Same was true of gay, lesbian, and bi people a couple of decades ago. They were repressed, but not as economically repressed as POC and immigrants making them more likely to fight back and easier for conservatives to identify with.